The Many Types Of Marketing

November 5, 2009

Lots of people are talking about all the new forms of marketing a company can pursue. It’s true, certain traditional marketing has been around for a long time and is still used today, but with the Internet now playing such a huge role in any company’s success, people are coming out with more and more ways to market their products or services. The more we thought about all the different varieties of marketing, the more we realized there are so many different ways to promote something. Here’s a list of marketing terms that we hope you find useful:

Online Marketing

Online marketing is any marketing strategy that takes place online. Also referred to as Internet marketing, it encompasses a variety of marketing forms like video advertisements, search engine marketing and e-mail marketing. It is the opposite of offline marketing, and can also fall under digital marketing. Online marketing needs a good approach in areas of design, development and advertising. A company with a total web site marketing plan will have more success online than one that has just designed a web site without thinking of how to market their company through it.

Offline Marketing

Offline marketing, the opposite of online marketing, includes all forms of marketing that aren’t done on the Internet. Examples of offline marketing are local advertising in newspapers and on television. In today’s marketing world, companies are finding ways to leverage their offline marketing campaigns with their online ones, making them complement each other.

Outbound Marketing

When you think of marketing, the different forms you come up with are mostly outbound marketing (also called traditional marketing). In fact, the majority of companies today are using different types of outbound marketing to reach their potential customers. Outbound marketing includes any marketing efforts that are taken to introduce a product or service to someone who isn’t looking for that product or service. Some examples are cold calling, sending newsletters, billboards, and banner ads on different web sites.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing focuses on having your company found by customers, as opposed to reaching out to them directly like in outbound marketing. The important thing to remember here is that a person starts out with the want/need to purchase a product or service, and they go out to find it. When they search for that product/service on a search engine, the search engine results page will show inbound marketing results. Instead of using paid advertisements, inbound marketing is the search engine optimization (SEO) part of web marketing.

Newsletter Marketing

Newsletter marketing and email marketing refer to ways of promoting your company through emails. Typically, a firm using newsletter marketing will have a group of contacts that they will send a newsletter containing some interesting information to. The success of newsletter marketing depends on grabbing attention, writing good content and reaching a large number of potential clients.

Article Marketing

Businesses will often write articles related to the industry they are in and distribute them online and offline. These free articles will inform people about an important topic and give the company that wrote it more credibility within the market. The organization can also include their business contact information in the article, allowing them to get new clients.

Trade Show Marketing

Companies that want to reach a large number of potential customers can participate in public or private trade shows. Trade shows and other forms of event marketing are often a large investment to participate in, but trade shows allow companies to demonstrate new products and examine what is going on in the industry.

Search Marketing

Search engine marketing (SEM) is the way in which companies promote their business through paid placement on search engines like Google. Instead of increasing the organic search results that a website has, companies will pay to have their advertisements in the sponsored section of search engines.

Direct Marketing

Direct marketing’s main goal is to send a message directly to consumers, without having to use any third party outlets. Examples of direct marketing include mail marketing, telemarketing and direct selling. Direct marketing is often preferable because the results can be easily measured, giving the marketer a better understanding of the success of that campaign.

Niche Marketing

When a product or service is not being readily supplied to a certain portion of a market, a company can focus their efforts on that niche to address a need that isn’t currently being addressed. This targeted marketing is successful because the marketer has identified a need that isn’t being resolved by mainstream providers. Sometimes it is beneficial for a company to focus on a niche instead of trying to compete in a larger market.

Drip marketing

Drip marketing is the act of sending out scheduled targeted emails that are all coordinated to a specific goal of client conversion. The sender uses email marketing software that allows them to setup multiple emails at one time and let them “drip” over time. This sometimes includes phone calls to check in on the clients along the way.

Social Media Marketing

Social network marketing and social media campaigns provide a window to market a product or service on the Internet through different social networks. Companies can use these outlets for their marketing, customer service and sales. The most common and successful means of social media marketing are found on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and even company blogs.

Referral Marketing

One of the less strategic types of marketing, referral marketing relies on a company’s customers to refer new customers to that company. Also called word of mouth marketing, this is a more spontaneous way of receiving new business, and can not be solely relied on because results aren’t very predictable. However, word of mouth is still a powerful part of a company’s efforts to bring in new business, especially in the social media community where communication travels freely.

Guerrilla Marketing

With a smaller budget, guerrilla marketing makes a splash by relying on energy, timing and unusual approaches to get the consumer’s attention. The unconventional marketing involved tries to get the most out something small, and make a lasting brand image in the consumer’s mind.

Promotional Marketing

Promotional marketing is a common form of marketing strategy that companies use to motivate a consumer to make a decision and purchase their product. There are a number of ways that businesses will promote a product or service, including holding contests to win a prize, offering coupons for purchasing a product at a discount, and having samples of the product so people can experience it before they purchase.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing most likely involves four different groups that contribute to the marketing effort. The Merchant is the company that is producing and selling the product, the Network is the outlet that is used to promote the affiliate link, the Publisher or Affiliate is the person who has the website with the affiliate ad and of course the customer doing the purchasing. Affiliate links are found on all types of websites, and they are used to drive traffic to outside websites.

Viral Marketing

This type of marketing relies on the message of a marketer being spread quickly through various social networks in order to increase brand awareness. The name viral marketing stems from the rapid spread of viruses in general. Typically, a viral marketing campaign will not last as long as other marketing efforts, but if a company can come up with a good idea for viral marketing and reach the right people, it will become highly successful in a short amount of time.

B2B Marketing

Any type of business, whether an organization, individual, government or other institution that markets to other businesses is involved in business to business marketing. Since B2B marketing involves companies trying to sell mass quantities of product to one another, there is a more personal relationship that needs to be established between businesses. If your company sells to other businesses, your marketing efforts will most likely be more direct.

B2C Marketing

Business to consumer marketing campaigns try to reach a category of people that will be likely to purchase their product or service. The marketing efforts the company takes should be more broad than B2B, which focuses on specific companies. B2C marketing can involve different marketing techniques such as door to door marketing, promotion marketing, newspaper marketing, television marketing and radio marketing. In today’s marketing world, B2C Internet marketing is becoming more important to reach consumers.

Mobile Marketing

Along with Internet marketing, mobile marketing is part of the newest groups of marketing activities. Companies have been experimenting with the certain ways to reach consumers through their phones, especially with the rise of Apple’s iphone. Some ways to marketing a product or service through a mobile phone include SMS marketing, in-game marketing, banner marketing on different web pages and location based marketing.

Reverse Marketing

This form of marketing is similar to inbound marketing. The goal of reverse marketing is to market a product in a way that will cause the consumer to seek the firm doing the marketing. Reverse marketing can be conducted through such means as television, print and Internet marketing. If a company has a product that solves a problem in the market, they will have more success using reverse marketing because they will seek out that product.

Telemarketing

A form of direct marketing, telemarketing’s focus is on reaching consumers by phone. Most of what we thing of as telemarketing is cold call marketing, which is unpopular and has lead to laws being created against it. However, telemarketing can be effective if the right person is reached on the phone at the right time.

Direct Mail Marketing

Most people receive large quantities of marketing material in the mail, which is considered direct mail marketing. Companies will send paper mail with promotions or other information to a list of addresses, usually in a common geographical area. This form of marketing is also called junk mail by some, because the customers receiving the mail aren’t expecting it and usually don’t want to open it.

Database Marketing

Database marketing is similar to other types of direct marketing, but the focus is more directed towards analyzing data. Companies try to narrow their marketing efforts down to certain groups of people, and they use database marketing to analyze statistics like name, address, or sales history, in order to create the most accurate model possible.

Personalized marketing

The goal of personalized marketing is to create a unique offer for each individual customer. This form of marketing doesn’t work for every company, but certain ones can capitalize on their unique products and customer demographics to market to individuals. With the Internet becoming a more popular place for marketing, companies are finding that personalized marketing is affective in cases when they can track a customer’s specific interests and send them more information for future suggestions.

This list should give you a good idea of different ways companies can market themselves to consumers or other companies, but there are still more types of marketing out there. If you think of any, let us know and we’ll add it to the list.

Depending on your company and the industry you are in, you will definitely choose different kinds of marketing that will produce the best results for you. No matter which type of marketing you want to use for your company, Design & Promote can help you research and implement a marketing campaign that will allow your company to win the consumer’s attention and hold the search engine results. Contact us today to explore more ways Design & Promote can help market your company.

Social Media Mistakes For Chicago Businesses To Avoid Part 2

October 29, 2009

In our last post, we discussed some ways that companies frequently make mistakes while using social media for their business, resulting in a passive approach and eventually a failing social media campaign. The following tips will help you and your company avoid making the opposite types of mistakes, being too aggressive with social media:

Creating Pages On Too Many Sites: Since social media for business is a time consuming endeavor, it is impossible to reach everyone and be involved on every social media website, all while running a successful business. Devote some time to research your industry on different social media sites and identify which ones will benefit your company the most. You need to find the place that will allow you to interact the most with your potential customers, and that is going to be different for every company.

Abusing The Rules: Social media users are a group of intelligent people that don’t want to be manipulated. If your organization uses certain techniques, for example, posting multiple spam-like messages in Facebook or Twitter to try and attract more fans, people will get upset with your company and stop following you. The majority of companies that make this mistake are just starting their efforts in social media and want to try and get their message out to the highest number of people as fast as possible. However, the better approach is to sign up, read what other people are talking about and get a good feeling about the overall conversation on that social media site, and then slowly join in with valuable information.

Obvious Selling: Companies that go on social media and try the usual hard sell tactics in business will find that followers/fans don’t respond positively to it. The whole social media culture is based on people communicating with others in order to help everyone. It is not about businesses selling their products to consumers in the social media realm, so don’t treat your followers like they are just there to buy your product. Remember, you have to contribute to the conversation before you can expect anyone to buy what you’re offering.

Deliberate SEO: It is not a secret that social media has become an important part of search engine optimization. This shouldn’t mean that the only reason why you’re on social media sites is to get more links to your website. Your success on Twitter, Facebook or anywhere else depends on how much you offer other people. They aren’t just search engine robots scanning your page and looking for keywords, so don’t expect them to stay your follower if all you’re looking for are keywords and backlinks.

Social Media Mistakes For Chicago Businesses To Avoid Part 1

October 27, 2009

Chicago social media is becoming more and more prominent within the small business community. Whether a company runs their own social media campaign or hires a Chicago social media expert to bring results, we should all be aware of certain mistakes that companies across the country have made on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

The most common mistakes companies of all sizes have been making in the social media community since businesses started promoting themselves can be broken down into two categories. There are the mistakes that are made because a company is not being proactive enough, and there are the mistakes made because they are being too aggressive with their social media campaigns. Here are some mistakes that fall in the first category:

Incomplete Profiles: Nobody recommends businesses to join every social media outlet; it’s just too time consuming. So if you choose two to three of the most beneficial ones to your company, there should be no reason why your efforts on that site aren’t completely devoted to succeeding there. If you make the decision to create an account, take the time to enter all your information and make your identity unique to your company. Add pictures, descriptions etc. so you can show people who you are. This is where your social media brand begins, and it is very important to have a good start so visitors know you are involved in social media for the right reasons and will have a better chance to engage with you.

Not Communicating With Fans: If you have a following, however large it is, make sure you are part of the conversation. If you don’t engage with the people who are talking about you on social media sites, their expectations won’t be met. There are plenty of companies that are great at responding to fans or even replying with a thank you, which means if you don’t do that consistently you will loser followers.

Quitting Your Campaign Too Early: Many of the small businesses in Chicago try out social media but don’t give it enough time to see results, so they just give up. Try to begin with a good marketing plan before you setup all your accounts, and use different tactics to engage with your followers/fans.

Inconsistent Posting: Social media is an ongoing approach to marketing your organization, and you need to understand that people use it every day and expect new content from you on a regular basis. You don’t have to update your pages every day, but if you take weeks at a time to post something new, you will most likely lose followers.

Coming up: social media mistakes because of being too aggressive.

Social Media Benefits For Retail Stores And Malls

September 12, 2009

We recently did a post on The Steps For Creating A Facebook Page For Your Business to show you how to setup Facebook for your personal or business use, and some tips on how to use it. This article is going to focus on the importance of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter for retail stores and malls.

General Benefits for Using Social Media

One of the greatest things about social media sites are cost benefits. Most of the social networking sites out there that you can setup a business account for are free, like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. You can add as many things to your account as you want and watch the number of followers grow without having to pay any fees. Social media also helps get more traffic to your website, so instead of spending a lot of money on online advertisements that may or may not turn into revenue, you can direct people to your company through free links.

Another unique reason for using social media marketing to grow your business is because you are instantly entered into a world where you can directly communicate with customers and fans of whatever it is that you offer. Instead of just trying to create new ways to find business, you can actually talk to the people who are interested in your company and have a one to one dialogue with them, which is beneficial to you both. You will be able to understand them more, offer them customer service faster and more efficiently, and also be able to stay current on all the latest trends in your industry.

Social Networking Usage for Stores

Companies on Facebook and Twitter are using social media to connect with customers by notifying them about special promotions, coupons, seasonal promotions and new website or store openings. Not only will a larger number of people be aware of these offers, but they will learn about them faster than any other form of marketing. With the use of Web-enabled mobile devices, customers of any age can know about your promotions as soon as you send them out.

Even whole shopping malls are creating Facebook and Twitter accounts so that they can connect with shoppers going to a variety of stores. By using social networking, malls are telling people about special events and in store promotions that are going on. Usually stores within a mall will have seasonal promotions, so social media is perfect for the whole mall to tell customers about annual promotions and events.

Challenges Businesses Face in Social Media

The main reason why so many companies struggle to succeed with social media is that it takes a lot of time to maintain a worthy campaign. There are too many sites out there to use, so it is important to choose the right ones for your specific industry. Also, if one area of social networking is very time consuming but not producing the right results, it is wasting a lot of your time to keep up.

You must also be aware that the mere number of posts or offers you have means nothing unless they are useful to the people looking at them. It’s important to make sure what you’re putting out there is interesting and valuable, while being eye-catching and user friendly at the same time. The popular example within the Facebook community is Wal-Mart, who made a page that had a corporate feel and didn’t fit in the Facebook world.

Visit our Facebook page: Design & Promote Facebook Page

We’ve Partnered With Constant Contact To Help Local Businesses Send Out Their First Newsletter

September 1, 2009

We recently added Constant Contact’s Business Partner Program to our list of effective and affordable tools to help clients build strong, lasting customer relationships. This program enables our clients to use effective E-mail Marketing and online survey products.

We are also offering a value added service to help businesses that want to send out monthly newsletters but need a little help getting started. We will work with you to design a newsletter template that matches your website or brand and send out your first marketing piece while coaching you along the way, all for the low price of $500.

“E-mail marketing and online surveys are proven tools that help small businesses connect with their customers and build successful customer relationships,” said Len Bruskiewitz, senior director, Partner Programs, Constant Contact.

As a Constant Contact Business Partner, we are able to provide our clients e-mail marketing and online survey capabilities. With SpeakUp! E-mail Marketing, Constant Contact’s e-mail marketing product, our clients can create professional-looking e-mails, manage contact e-mail lists, measure e-mail campaign results from clicks to open rates, and review who joins e-mail lists.

With ListenUp! Survey, Constant Contact’s online survey product, our clients have a tool to gain insight that will help them meet customer needs, generate new ideas, and grow their businesses or organizations. ListenUp! Survey also helps our clients analyze responses quickly; create targeted e-mail lists based on survey responses, take action, and follow-up with relevant e-mail communications.

“Our customers are always looking for effective ways to grow their businesses,” Stacy Jones, president of Design & Promote, said in a news release. “Constant Contact’s customer communication tools give our clients a valuable addition to our core services of web design and search engine optimization. Constant Contact’s ease-of-use and affordability made the partner program a great solution to meet our clients’ email marketing needs.”

You can get more information, view a live demo or sign up for a 60 day trial at our Constant Contact business partner portal below.
Design & Promote Newsletter Marketing

How To Use Newsletter Marketing Effectively

July 10, 2009

Newsletters are growing increasingly popular as a marketing tool for any business these days. A marketing newsletter is a document that notifies, reminds, advises, communicates and advertises about a business to its target audience and customer base. If used effectively, a newsletter can create immense interest and awareness about an organization and its business activities. That is why it is quite judicious to make effective use of a newsletter to promote a business.

In comparison to other PR tools like targeted sales calls or television advertisements, newsletter are quite cost effective. Since Marketing newsletters don’t require any heavy duty investment, unlike affiliate marketing or television advertisements, even a small-scale business owner can try out his or her hand at writing effectual marketing newsletters. You can simply send these new letters to your existing and prospective client base through e-mails in order to delineate the key details about your products and business. These marketing newsletters would thus help you to increase public visibility and enhance the customer base for your business, just as product advertisement would do.

However, if you want to use a newsletter to promote your business or product, you must keep in mind certain key things.  When you send newsletters to your customer, you should remember that newsletters are intrinsically different from advertisements. Advertisements can contain fabricated words or too much self appreciation. However, newsletters should always have a factual basis. Even if the aim of a newsletter is to entice the customer about your products or services it should always be grounded in reality and be quite informational. Thus, the content of a good marketing newsletter, apart from being attractive for the target audience, should always be factual and impartial, otherwise it would lose its credibility towards the customers.

A perfectly written newsletter should always aspire to lure more and more people in to glean more information about the organization. If you send regular newsletters to your existing customer base depicting the details about your latest products and services this would help familiarize them with your business activities. This can, in turn, help to build an allegiance or brand loyalty towards your business. That is why an ideal marketing newsletter should always harp on your USP or unique selling point or your business. In this phase of global economic depression when everyone is clamoring after low hanging fruit, a well written newsletter can help you to achieve that golden target, and without much of an investment.

There are many online newsletter program out there from iContact, Aweber, Subscribermail and many more.  The leader we feel after using all of the above and more is Constant Contact.

They are not the cheapest but the way their templates are set up is very nice, can be modified easily and can get you out of the gate with a nice looking personalized looking newsletter in the quickest time we feel.

Design & Promote is a business partner with Constant Contact and have developed dozens of newsletters and currently manage clients with email lists larger than 25,000.

Sign up for a free 60 day trial with Constant Contact and see how you like it, just click here.

If you would like some help in getting your first newsletter program off the ground we can design a great template that reflets your brand, import your initial list of names and train you on all aspects of newsletter marketing, Prices start at $500. Contact Us for more details
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Don’t Drown Your Marketing Budget

March 15, 2009

Are the Yellow Pages drowning your budget?

The Internet is the New Ocean…

Can we help build you a life raft?

Online Marketing And Getting Noticed

February 23, 2009

I have asked a few people lately some questions about their online marketing efforts.

Do you have a website?
Are you looking to get your business noticed?
Are you still advertising in the yellow pages?
How is your website traffic?
Are you able to track where your leads are coming from?

Two of the only questions that people were able to answer was – Yes, I have a website.  Yes, I advertise in the Yellow Pages.

Many companies will invest the time in having a website built, but is it structurally able to produce results when it comes to your traffic and exposure?

Many companies are approached by SEO Firms with the “guarantee” of being number one in Google, MSN or Yahoo, the top three search engines. The fact of the matter is search engines and search marketing changes continually; over time we have seen proven results in the increase in traffic and lead generation due to various techniques in search marketing and SEO. Can we guarantee you will be number one in Google, no, but we will guarantee to continue to work with you toward your internet marketing goals.